Product and Project Management

This specialization is led by Alex Cowan, a Batten Fellow and industry veteran with experience in five entrepreneurial ventures and one ‘intrapreneurial’ venture. His Venture Design framework is widely used by educators and practitioners for disciplined product innovation. Join one course or all five to learn about designing and building software in a high velocity, hypercompetitive operating environment.

In this course, you’ll learn how to use agile and design thinking to deliver valuable solutions. We’ll look at how these two disciplines are at a critical convergence point and what that means for successful practice.

Learn how to give yourself just enough time and just the right focus so you can successfully integrate quality design and testing into your projects. You’ll learn how to establish situation-appropriate plans to learn what you need to know to avoid waste and deliver value. This may mean testing user motivation, interface usability or solution fit.

This course will focus on testing the conceptual agile stack: motivation, usability, architecture and implementation. We’ll look at both traditional and nontraditional approaches to managing quality assurance with agile, and how to manage your team away from stress and towards a test-driven mindset.

Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course, also led by Alex Cowan, will help you along your learning journey.

This popular foundational course taught by Yael Grushka-Cockayne covers the key concepts of planning and executing projects. You will learn how to identify factors that lead to project success, as well as how to plan, analyze and manage projects. In addition, you will learn about state-of-the-art methodologies and how to consider the challenges of various types of projects.